Current weather

Georgia encyclopedia headed for cyberspace

Printed version to be released after online debut

Posted: Wednesday, June 07, 2000

By Lee ShearerStaff Writer

A project just getting underway at the University of Georgia will be a kind of poster child at a National Endowment for the Humanities meeting Friday -- the $2.3 million ''New Georgia Encyclopedia,'' which aims to be the first such publication created with cyberspace in mind.

The New Georgia Encyclopedia is still a couple of years off, because it will take some time to gather together everything there is to know about the state of Georgia, much less put together a Web site that makes that much information accessible free of charge.

Georgia is the first state to attempt such a project, said UGA history professor John Inscoe, who last year gave up his job as editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly to edit the Encyclopedia.

The encyclopedia will eventually be available in a printed version -- but only after the online version is up and running, Inscoe said.

It will also be designed to be used in different ways depending on the requirements of different groups of people -- tourists, journalists, or schoolchildren writing reports, for example, he explained.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has been promoting the idea of state encyclopedias around the country, and Friday's meeting in Washington, D.C. will bring together about 70 people from around the country to hear from a handful of states who have begun encyclopedia projects -- including Georgia's online project.

It's part of a ''regionalism initiative'' by NEH Director William Ferris, who knows a thing or two about encyclopedias. Ferris was for 18 years director of the Oxford, Miss., Center for the Study of Southern Culture and was a co-editor of the 1989 best-seller ''The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.''

The Georgia project is really the brainchild of Georgia Humanities Council executive director Jamil Zainaldin, who in 1998 brought together a group of scholars to talk about a follow-up to the ''New Georgia Guide,'' a one-volume guide to the state published by the University of Georgia Press.

By the end of the 1998 session, the group was unanimously in favor of the online encyclopedia project, Zainaldin said.

''We have so many people now, especially young people who are using the Internet, and here we have a chance to provide people in Georgia with a reliable source of information about our state's past and people. In a sense it's a portal you can enter without leaving your desk, and it's free,'' Zainaldin said.

The encyclopedia will be available not only to students in Georgia schools and anyone with a Georgia library card, but anyone with Internet access, he said.

The project is being funded partly with state money, primarily $500,000 earmarked by Gov. Zell Miller and Gov. Roy Barnes. But the bulk will come from private corporations and foundations, Inscoe said. The Woodruff Foundation has also chipped in with $500,000, and Georgia Power, Bell South and the Cox Foundation have contributed smaller amounts.

Also heavily involved in the project are the University of Georgia Press, and the University System of Georgia's Galileo Project, a computer network that links all the state's major libraries.

The New Georgia Encyclopedia won't likely have all the bells and whistles that a generation grown accustomed to streaming video might like, conceded Mike Merrill of Merrill-Hall New Media of Atlanta, the Internet design and consulting firm hired to custom-design the data base and Web site for the encyclopedia.

That's partly because the scholars who are producing the encyclopedia are print-oriented people, he said. But it's also a recognition that the Web site that they're creating is just the beginning of something that will grow and change with time -- in keeping with the nature of cyberspace.

''They're going for breadth right now. We're really building this for the future. We want something for today and for tomorrow, to make this thing last -- something that will grow and last and be adaptable. Ferris really sees this as a model other states should emulate,'' said Merrill, who holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA.

His partners in the company are an information technology expert out of Georgia Tech and a lawyer from the University of California at Berkeley.

Merrill also hopes the project will pay off for the company, which is designing new kinds of editing and other software for the project -- software which might be licensed for profit to publishing companies or newspapers in the future.

''The publishing industry seems on the verge of major changes,'' he said. ''One reason we're doing this is to develop an editing system that will allow us to go very easily to the Web or to print,'' he said.

Former University of Kentucky Press director Nancy Grayson is project coordinator for the encyclopedia, and just recently began the process of organizing a team that eventually will produce articles on hundreds, even thousands of Georgia topics.

The first step has been identifying experts in roughly 25 general subject areas, who include UGA experts such as Charles Hudson (pre-colonial Georgia history), Hugh Ruppersburg (literature) and Charles Bullock (politics).